Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses

Yahoo Mail, like most email providers, offers options to filter or block email messages that you receive.

The difference between filtering emails and blocking them is easy to explain: A filter moves the messages to another folder on the site, e.g. a custom folder that you have created, or the trash.

Blocking email addresses on the other hand prevents emails from those addresses from reaching your account. They are rejected and therefore do not land in your inbox, spam folder or any other folder that you may have created.

Blocking has a higher priority than filtering, which means that any filters that you may have created for blocked email addresses won't run anymore.

Filtering emails

Yahoo Mail filters

There are several reasons why you may want to filter emails on Yahoo Mail. Here is a small selection:

You may want to move mails from specific senders to a custom folder to get a better overview.

To archive select emails in the same location.

To move select emails directly to trash.

To move unimportant emails out of the inbox folder.

To filter an email on Yahoo, do the following:

Right-click the email in question and select Filter emails like this from the context menu.

This opens the Add Filter dialog on the screen.

Part of it is already filled out with information taken from the selected email. This includes usually the name and sender (email address).

You can make modifications here if you want, for instance to filter only emails from that sender that have a specific subject line, or body text.

As far as filtering options go, you can define that the email should contain, should not contain, begins with or ends with select strings.

This can be useful to create a catch all filter for example. Say you want to filter out email addresses from a specific domain. Simply type only the domain name in the sender field to do so.

The only thing you need to configure as well is the destination folder you want the emails to be moved to. This can be any custom folder, the inbox folder, or the trash.

Blocking email addresses

blocked addresses

There are situations where you may want to block emails that originate from an address right away. Maybe you are receiving lots of spam from that address or someone is harassing you.

Whatever the reason, blocking email address is an effective counter-measure as it makes sure that you won't receive emails from the selected address anymore.

Update: The new interface looks like this. The main change is that the entry is called banned addresses now and no longer blocked addresses.

To block email addresses on Yahoo, do the following:

Click on the settings icon in the upper right corner of the screen next to your screen name and select Settings from the context menu.

This opens the settings menu. Navigate to Banned Addresses.

To block an address, simply enter it under Add an address and click on the block button afterwards.

Note that you need to enter a full email address. Wildcards or partial emails are not accepted.

You can unblock an email address at any time by selecting it here and a click on the remove button.

Summary

Article Name

Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses

Description

The guide walks you through the steps of filtering emails on Yahoo Mail, or blocking email addresses and thus emails from those addresses.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

Publisher

Ghacks Technology News

Logo

Please share this article

About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Responses to Yahoo Mail: How to filter and block email addresses

Well, here's the problem with blocking email addresses on Yahoo... the email addresses you want to block the most are the relentless SPAMmers, and their email addresses are bogus to begin with. You can block them a hundred times, and they just make up a hundred new email addresses. They pretty well know you can block their address, so they rarely use the same address twice.There's no stopping them. The SPAM filters on Yahoo suck, compared to Gmail.

The emails with a legitimate email address will usually contain a link to unsubscribe. If they're kind enough to provide a link to unsubscribe, I'm sure they'll be kind enough to honor your request.

No, there's no getting rid of that rich diplomat in Zambia that wants you to handle his finances in your bank account, or the girl who remembers you from the adult dating site that wants you to click on the link to her sexy pictures, and... well, you get the picture.

I am getting loads of spam, in fact NOTHING is now going in my Yahoo! mail spam folder unless I put it there. I constantly marks stuff as spam but over the past few weeks their spam filter has been utterly useless. Any word from Yahoo! about this? I cannot contact them directly, they don't allow this for free users anymore.

HTF am I supposed to block that if I cant use wildcards or anythings else?

Your directions say to "copy everything after the '@' sign" and put it into the box to block the email. Well, guess what? I have TRIED EVERY WAY POSSIBLE to block email, but I AM STILL FUCKING GETTING BLOCKED EMAIL WTF? You should take a lesson from Gmail; their spam blocking works wonderfully!

Not 100's but 1000's over the last few years. You can't block or filter on the "Sender" because they change that every time. I've tried to block with "contains" Viagra in the Subject, doesn't work.... I've tried "contains" in the Body - doesn't work either.... I've tried various bits of "contains" but none of them work!!!! I've checked for non standard characters in the text but that's not the solution either.... I can get 30 of these in a day!!!! Can someone get this to work!?

Yahoo mail is worthless. It used to be the spam filters and blocking worked but not any more! I suspect yahoo may be getting paid by these spam domains as I can no other reason to be getting email from a domain that is blocked! Probably gearing up to charge for email offering a new improved service or something. It's either that or gross incompatence!

I went nearly mad trying to do this. I copied all the addresses correctly into the "Banned Addresses" feature in the Settings. Several times. But the emails still came through every time and every time I opened the Banned addresses to see what was happening, and all the addresses had disappeared. Several times. Then tried the Block feature from the actual emails. Did this several times... nothing.

I've been googling, and a lot of people are just saying Yahoo Block/Ban feature simply DOES NOT WORK.

Well. That's the last straw that has me moving permanently over to gmail.

Seriously, Martin Brinkman, why do you even leave this article up? If you'd tried your own instructions at all you would see the truth of what everyone else here is saying.... it DOESN'T WORK. You just look like a fool blandly rabbiting on about click this and configure that. It's idiotic. Did we stutter?? It. Does. Not. Work.

Popular Deals

About Ghacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.